


must be something in the water

by hattalove



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Happy Ending, M/M, Pirates, Prison, Revenge, Violence, a throwaway reference to cannibalism, also more unbridled ben winston hate because nothing makes me happier, not a whole lot and it isn't super graphic but i put a warning just in case, pirates!, times are tough y'all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-06-22 21:16:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15590886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hattalove/pseuds/hattalove
Summary: They all remember, somewhere deep down, why they gave up everything they had for the Mermaid.The last vestiges of kindness and bravery and everything that is good in the world are on board that ship. Louis’s heart is on it, moored by some nameless jetty.





	must be something in the water

**Author's Note:**

> PIRATES! how do we feel about this, guys? i don't know how we feel about this, but regardless. here it is . 
> 
> title is from [bruises](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84znrPmOePc) by lewis capaldi (which you have to listen to. i mean. you don't have to, but you definitely should) 
> 
> hope you enjoy whatever this is ♥

Being in jail isn’t ideal. 

It especially isn’t ideal when it’s an English jail, and you’re a widely-known traitor to the crown, and nobody ever checks to make sure that the single guard is behaving himself. 

Louis gets fed up somewhere around his third broken finger. It starts small, really; first it’s the rats gnawing on his toes while he sleeps. Then, it’s Liam’s sad eyes always watching him from the darkness, like an owl with a grudge. After that, it’s the guard forgetting them entirely for two days, and then giving them all an individual beating for not making more noise. 

But the last straw – the one that tops Louis’s very large mental pile of straws that are actually all grudges against the English – is hearing that Captain Winston has set sail again. And not only that – he’s set sail with half the men on Eleuthera, and taken a sloop and two men-of-war with him. 

As if he’s on a hunt for someone. 

As if, as soon as he finds that someone, he’s prepared to blow them into pieces right on the water. 

As if he’s broken the only condition Louis gave him before he voluntarily surrendered himself, his ship, and his crew. 

And so, on what Liam tells him is their four hundredth and fifth day being locked away on Harbour Island, Louis stops pretending that bars could ever contain him.

*

“Captain,” Liam says, for what is probably the fifth time. “Louis.”

Louis puts down his spyglass with a huff. “ _What_.” 

“We’re in no state to fight. I’m not sure we’re in a state to sail, actually.” 

Louis surveys what’s left of his crew. Liam had told them to grab anything they could find, so most of them are holding heaps of rot and rust – broom handles, mossy rocks, hole-ridden hats, the remnants of what used to be their blades. One of the men is struggling to contain an armful of yapping puppies.

But beyond how ridiculous they look, they’re all watching him with the dark eyes of people who swore to follow him into the storm and lived to see the kind of misery that erases all promises. They’re bedraggled, bearded, bone-thin, covered in rotten scraps of cloth. They must be feeling just as blind as Louis is in the sudden sunlight, and still, they’re watching his every move. 

Liam, like any man with a brain, must be correctly anticipating that he will soon have a bloody mutiny on his hands. 

But there can’t be a mutiny until there is a ship. 

Louis turns, leaning against the rock that’s hiding them. 

“Listen to me,” he says, and the already silent crew somehow quiets further. “I know, all right? I know. I didn’t like eating rats either.” 

Very few of them have muscle left, and those who do don’t move a single one.

“I’m the one who made you do it,” he continues, carefully checking for escape routes. Maybe, just this once, there _can_ be a mutiny. “But you all know why, and let me remind you that none of you resisted.” 

A horrible, endless silence. In Louis’s periphery, Liam’s hand goes to where, once upon a time, his blade used to hang. 

“We were up against barely twenty redcoats, with ten pistols among them. We could’ve taken them in our sleep, but we let them take us instead, and you _all know why_.” 

A whisper of wind trickles through a crack in the rock, bringing with it air that’s thin enough for Louis to breathe. Bringing a ghost of salt and tar and wet sisal, the creak of a settling deck and the swinging of a hammock. The promise of waves under their feet instead of solid, brutal stone. 

“We’ve all been in the dark with our thoughts for a little too long, but allow me to ask for one last thing. Just this once. Turn those thoughts out there,” he stretches his arm out, to where the sea is rolling into a quiet harbour. “We all gave our freedom so the Mermaid could sail free, and right now, Winston is out there making fools of us. He has a day’s head start on finding her, and two hundred guns combined.”

Finally, some of the gaunt faces in front of him begin moving – a whisper there, and a couple of ears leaning in to hear. The considering twitch of an eyebrow. 

“Sail under your quartermaster, if you don’t want to listen to me. But I cannot and will not let him touch that ship. I will not let all of this suffering be for nothing.” 

“We aren’t even forty strong,” Liam says, quieter now that their men aren’t looking like murder is their first priority. “We have no idea what the weather has been, and we don’t know what the hell they’ve done to our ship.” 

Let her collet debris right in the harbour, probably. Had her uselessly float there at anchor, a warning like a strung up pirate corpse. 

“But,” says Liam, and suddenly everyone’s listening to him. “Your Captain is right, and I will follow him.” 

Louis almost smiles, lifting one corner of his mouth until the dry skin on his cheek cracks. 

“Let’s take our ship back,” he says, desperately searching the crowd for a pair of eyes that understands at least a little bit. They all remember, somewhere deep down, why they gave up everything they had for the Mermaid. 

The last vestiges of kindness and bravery and everything that is good in the world are on board that ship. Louis’s heart is on it, moored by some nameless jetty, or maybe running from Winston already. 

But it’s alive, still. Louis feels that much. He’s firmly convinced they’ll take their last breaths at the same time, whether they’re together or apart. 

“Let’s take our ship back, and sink that bastard once and for all. Then,” he swallows, but it’s as easy a decision as surrender, “then, the Lion is yours.” 

He doesn’t specify which outcome he wants, and he doesn’t need to. If they get the Mermaid, he’s gone; if they don’t get her, he’s gone. 

One of the Mates steps forward – Mr Williams, Louis thinks, but he can’t be sure after all that time. “Ours?” he asks, his voice stronger than it has any right to be. 

“I’ll surrender her to Mr Payne,” Louis says, putting his hands deep in the pockets of his new overcoat, which he stole off the jail guard’s cooling body. “You’ll then be free to elect a new captain, or surrender her for a pardon, or chop her up for firewood.” 

He tries to look everyone in the eye in turn, but there’s too many of them, staring at him with gaunt faces like a swarm of flesh-hungry flies. 

“I give you my word,” he says, with every ounce of authority left in him. 

Then, he brandishes their only good sword and leaps over the rock.

*

Taking the Lion back is laughably easy, even for a crew of starved, near-toothless, scurvy-ridden pirates. It’s guarded by a grand total of two men who are in the middle of a game of cards, hats slouching so far into their faces they don’t see Louis coming until it’s too late.

His men – reluctantly, of course – tie the bodies against the mast before they head to open water. The freshwater they had in the hold is still drinkable, but the only food left is three barrels’ worth of dry beans. Louis has no idea how long this is going to take – he can go days without food, they all can, but they’ve been through too much to throw away fresh meat. 

Thankfully Captain Winston, as the prize idiot that he is, makes himself relatively easy to follow. As dusk falls, and they all pause on the deck to take in the stunning simplicity of the sun setting over water, a lone keel emerges among the waves – a small ship, sunk brutally and efficiently. What’s left of her has more holes than a block of cheese. 

“Survivors?” Louis calls to the forecastle, where Liam is looking a little green as he stares into the sea. Instead of answering, he points down.

The Lion’s hull is just breaching the site of the slaughter, raising red foam. Blood stains the surface of the sea like oil, and Louis finally makes out the concrete shapes of what he had thought were fish.

They’re men – as thin as his own, resembling a crew of floating skeletons as waves wash over them. Some of them are eternally embracing pieces of debris, locked around what little remained of their home after the Captain was through with them. 

In the middle of the carnage, contorted and ghostly, drifts the ship’s black. 

There’s nothing any of them can do but grip the rail and stare as the bowsprit sets their course away, straight into the sun that’s now turning red. 

Whispers rise, quiet prayers from those who still believe. Everyone on board bumps shoulders in reassurance, in determination, and Louis finally feels like the lamps aren’t the only fire burning on deck. 

They could’ve met any of those men in a port somewhere, when money and drink and whores changed hands. They all could have been a part of that crew instead of this one. 

They all could have died nameless, homeless, and unremembered, holding on to splintered wood for comfort. 

None of them sleep that night. Louis suspects they all take comfort in being awake with no walls in sight. They watch the sun come back up and mist over, the horizon blurring until the Lion is sailing through white endlessness on its own. 

A few hours later, they pass the debris of what used to be a sloop, some of its barrels still floating. 

They adjust the course. As bits of rope and bowls of soaked beans are passed around, Louis feels a whisper of their old grandeur brush them by. 

People used to fear them in these seas, once upon a time. Through catastrophic losses and hunger and misery, Louis raised these men to an absolute, death-defying fearlessness. 

Until his own fears caught up with him, and he found the price too high to pay. 

Liam joins him on the quarterdeck around what might be noon, going by the white glow above their heads. 

“You feel that?” he asks, without explanation. He doesn’t need to explain, and Louis supposes that’s one of the few advantages of growing up together as street mongrels. 

“Yeah,” Louis replies, just this side of grim. Being hopeful is the only way to keep himself upright, but worry, over and over, snakes under his coat and wraps around his chest. “Sea’s shaking.” 

“He’s going to be okay,” Liam says. 

“We don’t know what’s been happening,” Louis shakes his head. “That waste of air had us all rotting in a cellar while he planned this.” 

“Exactly,” Liam replies. He loosens his stance, and the sway of the water brings his body into Louis’s, warm even in the clammy chill. “He doesn’t know what became of the Mermaid. Maybe they’ve gone to land like you told them to.” 

Louis snorts. The salt in the air stings inside his nose, and it’s the best feeling in the world. “You know exactly how likely that is.” 

Liam, though, looks satisfied enough to have got an emotion out of him. He claps Louis on the shoulder, which morphs into an embrace too genuine for the dirty deck of a pirate ship. 

He’s going to be okay, Liam’s voice echoes in Louis’s head, and he absorbs the words into the very core of himself like a sea sponge. He’s going to be okay. 

Louis thinks he can feel him, across the endless expanse of water. He hopes, against hope, that the fluttering in his chest is his heart coming back to life.

In the next two hours they take advantage of the fog, and Louis thinks they might sail closer to Nassau than they should. Everyone there is pretending to be on the straight and narrow now, or so he’s heard. 

There’s a smattering of cliffs jutting out of the water off the North side of the island – the Devil’s Horns, as the locals unimaginatively call them. Wisps of cooling air wrap around them like pale fingers, twisting into the Lion’s foresails when she gets close enough. An eerie silence closes around them – the kind that surrounds a cemetery. 

They’re so close. 

And sure enough – as soon as they get further away from land, and the fog lifts to sit heavy above their heads, an uncertain shout of “Sails!” comes down from the nest.

They’re sails, all right. Patched with scraps of fabric in every colour imaginable, fluttering in the wind like birds. 

The Mermaid’s sails. Harry’s sails. 

Harry’s ship. 

Being boarded by the English. 

“Raise the black!” Louis screams across the deck, and his crew echoes the command, man to man until it reaches a pair of hands. Louis runs to the forecastle, his blood beating so heavily it shakes the boards underneath him. 

He’s got his sword out without realising, just waiting to get close enough to leap, damn the consequences. The Mermaid is whole, and there’s a commotion on her deck, which means they’re not lost yet. 

Behind him, Liam directs the crew in a manoeuvre only insane men would attempt. They drop the anchor, and the litter they’d picked up on Harbor Island flies across the deck as they bring the ship about. Louis is close now, close enough to make out individual people stumbling around the other ship, to recognise the glint of swords locked in countless duels. He searches breathlessly, frantically, for a curly head of hair, but there’s too much fog. Too much blood, guts, life trickling away from redcoats and pirates alike, and Harry’s nowhere to be seen. 

Finally, the Lion sways to a lurching stop. Louis doesn’t wait to give instructions or receive them – he swings the first hook he can get his hands on, and climbs up the Mermaid’s booming belly. The wood is slippery underneath him. The swell of the sea threatens to buck him straight into the water, but there isn’t a force on earth that could make him let go of the rope. 

He jumps onto the deck all but foaming at the mouth, sword raised to cleave anyone who stands in his way in two – and he arrives just in time for the last of the English to slump, very much dead, at his feet. 

The crew freezes in that breathless moment after battle, looking up and down the deck to make sure all enemies have been dealt with. One by one, their gazes catch on Louis’s gaunt silhouette. 

Louis is searching, still. Dismissing man after man as too thin, too fat, too blonde. 

There’s no way, he thinks. There’s no way they’d fight like this if they—if Harry—

“Captain?” somebody asks into the silence that’s wrapped around them. It’s a quiet, reverent sound. Louis doesn’t know how to match the calmness of it, so he doesn’t say anything. 

He drops his sword. Somewhere underneath him, he thinks he can hear his crew starting to board, but it’s already fading as Louis’s head fills with a pounding, thundering rage. 

“Captain,” somebody says again, and Louis can’t see who it was even if he wanted to.

What he does see, in a stroke of luck, is Captain Winston on his knees, tied up and held back by at least four men. His face is red with anger.

The pain in Louis’s knuckles sings when he hits him straight in the nose. 

“Captain,” another time. A different voice, perhaps, but Louis has business here that he very much intends to finish. “Captain!” 

He punches Winston again, a merciless hit to the jaw. His mind is reeling, picking through a lifetime of experience for a way to make this hurt as much as possible. 

He draws back. Fingers that he immediately recognises as Liam’s halt his swing. 

“Louis, for Pete’s sake. Come back. Listen to me.” 

And then another voice. Slicing, clean, through the degenerating chaos in Louis’s head. 

“I’d thank you to step away from my prisoner.” 

Always so fucking proper, he was. A true Englishman if Louis has ever met one. 

He turns around, on his heel, on a prayer. And in front of him, just tall enough, just slim enough, stands the captain of the ship. 

Louis’s knees buckle. Every one of the four hundred and six days of regret, of exhaustion, of longing, settles into his bones all at once. 

Liam grips his elbow before he hits the ground.

There’s no recognition on Harry’s face, not at first. Louis watches as Harry picks his way through the unfamiliar scars on his face, through the wild beard, the greasy hair, the wrinkles etched where youth should still be keeping them away. 

He picks his way through them, and then looks into Louis’s eyes. 

“Hello,” Louis whispers, his throat suddenly full of sand, or perhaps something more sentimental. 

Harry opens his mouth and closes it in silence. Louis tries for a smile, for reassurance, but all he can find in himself is an overwhelming yearning.

“This suits you,” he says. _You’re not seeing a ghost_ is what he’s really trying to say, because the shade of Harry’s skin blends in with the fog around him, and his knees are locked solid, resisting the up-and-down sway of the ship. 

But finally, finally, he speaks. 

“The blood?” Harry asks, his salt-white lips trembling around the words. But there’s a smile, a small one, only just learning how to etch itself into the solid cliffs of Harry’s face. “I’ve looked better.” 

He raises a hand to wipe on the smear on his cheek, self-conscious, and Louis is suddenly choking on all the space between them.

He steps forward. Pulls Harry’s arm away, and replaces Harry’s fingers with his own. 

Blood meets blood – the thunderous pulse in Louis’s fingertips, the butterfly flutter of veins on the underside of Harry’s wrist. Warm from the fight, from each other’s presence. 

Warm.

_Alive._

“This,” Louis repeats, but he’s not sure it’s aloud. “The sea. The ship.” He looks up. “That stupid fucking hat.” 

Louis’s hat. Louis’s hat, left behind in Harry’s cabin before they got caught in this shitty whirlpool. 

He can pinpoint the second Harry lets himself believe, and it’s every sunrise all at once. Something invisible loosens in his face, and his lips open, and before he can speak at all Louis is holding on to him, clenching his fingers in the waxy fabric of Harry’s coat until his nails leave holes. 

Until the horizon, finally, straightens out. Until the world aligns. 

“He told me you were dead,” Harry gasps into him, a spot Louis doesn’t recognise because he only feels Harry instead of himself. “Winston, he—when he came back up on the deck and said he was taking the ship—“ 

“Harry,” Louis gasps back, finding every point of Harry’s body that soothes, stroking his back, squeezing his arms. “Harry. Darling.” 

And Harry sobs, just once, aware of their combined crews looking on. 

“It’s you,” he says, and then gets stuck repeating it until the words fall apart. “It’s you. _It’s you_.” 

“It’s me,” Louis nods, and gets the bizarre urge to laugh. “I would’ve always come back to you. Even if I were dead.” 

Harry presses curious fingertips to his cheek, his hairline, the point of his eyebrow. Relearning in a matter of seconds. 

“Where have you been?” he asks, soft, touching the ragged scar running down Louis’s neck. “What did he do?” 

Louis looks over his shoulder. The crew is force-feeding Winston raw rat meat for no other apparent reason than fun, and he looks—he looks like just a man. A small, broken, bleeding man in a blue coat, slumped on a deck, with the red of defeat soaking the knees of his trousers. 

Louis holds his gaze for a fleeting second, and never looks at him again.

“Tried to come between me and you,” he tells Harry, rubbing away the red marks on his face, untangling the wild hair sticking out from beneath the hat. “He’s not a very smart man.” 

He’ll tell Harry about Eleuthera, one day – about the rats and the stale bread and the constant thought of whether Harry was all right, and alive, and some approximation of happy. 

One day, he thinks – when Liam sails away with his ship, and the fog is gone, and there aren’t any eyes that watch them hold each other. 

One day – once his heart gets used to being home again.

_~fin_

**Author's Note:**

> as always i sometimes hang around on [tumblr](http://hattalove.tumblr.com)! feel free to come Communicate with me there


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